I looked at them. “Are you saying the magic brought everyone in the hallway?”
“Everyone who was standing here,” Rhys said. “We missed the fun by moments.”
There were other voices up and down the hallway, agreeing or bemoaning the paler colors they had chosen to wear. “We cannot all go freshen our clothes at the same time,” Doyle said. “Some of us must stay here and work. The human police are on their way, and this has taken much of our time.”
I wasn’t wearing a watch; no one was, because watches and clocks ran oddly inside faerie. So oddly that telling time by them was useless. How did anyone know where to be and when? They approximated, and we spent a lot of time being fashionably late.
“Fine, divide everybody into shifts for a change of clothes, and could someone get me fresh underwear?”
Mistral held up my ripped panties. “I don’t suppose these would be very useful. I am sorry that I damaged them.” He held them out to me.
“I’m not sorry,” I said, and pressed his hand back around the satin.
A pleased look filled his eyes, replacing the sorrow. His hands convulsed around the bit of satin. I noticed that he’d found time in all the fuss to tuck himself back inside his pants. “May I keep it as a sign of my lady’s favor?”
I nodded. “You may.”
He raised his hand to his face in an old-fashioned salute, but the look in his eyes made me shiver. He turned with a smile to get his men on their feet and give them their duties.
Frost had turned away. I caught his arm. “What is wrong?”
“Nothing, I’m going to go change.” But he wouldn’t look at me. Frost had a tendency to be moody. If I’d had more time I would have asked more questions, but the humans were coming, and we were out of time. I promised myself that if he stayed sulky I’d find out what was wrong. I was hoping it was some momentary mood and nothing more.
Doyle said, “Let him go, he’ll need a little time to adjust.”
I frowned at him. “Adjust to what?”
Doyle gave a smile that was more sad than happy. “Later, if you still need to ask, I will explain, but now we have very little time to question our witnesses. You have called the police into the sithen, Princess, and we must prepare.”
He was right, but I wanted to know what had I missed. It couldn’t be just about sex with Mistral, they’d all seen me have sex with others. But if not that, then what? I shook my head, smoothed my short skirt, and put it from my mind. We had a crime to solve if the Goddess would give us enough free time to do it. I couldn’t seem to control the wild magic that was returning to us, but I could at least pretend to control the murder investigation. Though the tight feeling in my stomach told me I didn’t have much control over either.CHAPTER 9
SOME OF THE MEN WENT TO CLEAN UP. OTHERS WENT TO AWAIT the police at the door to the sithen because they would never find their way in on their own. The door moved, and it didn’t like strangers. Only magic could hold the door open for mortal step that had never crossed its threshold before. When we had divided everyone up, we found we were missing someone. Onilwyn hadn’t been in the hallway. He hadn’t gone with Rhys, so he hadn’t returned with him. He was simply gone. He’d been Cel’s creature for centuries. I did not like that he had gone missing just after such a major magical happening. It made me think he’d gone to tattle to his true master, or whoever was bearing tales to Cel in his prison cell.
We threaded our way between the two bodies that were still waiting for the police. When we were close to the large kitchen door, I heard shouting and barking. Maggie May’s accent was thick because she was angry. “You are a bla’guard, tree man, that you are. Get out of my kitchen!” Her little terriers were doing their version of shouting right along with her.
“I’m trying,” a man’s voice yelled.
We got to the door in time to see a cast-iron skillet the size of a small shield smash into Onilwyn’s back. It staggered him, and other pots and pans drove him to all fours. Pans of copper and stainless steel flashed their polished brightness as they hit his body, but it was the deep black cast-iron skillets in their various sizes that were beating him down. Cold iron has been proof against faeries for a very long time. The sidhe may rule faerie, but cold iron still hurts.
Maggie May stood in her kitchen, surrounded by a storm of pots, pans, ladles, spoons, forks, and knives, like an evil metal snow globe with her small brown figure as its centerpiece. The ladles joined the attacks of the pots and pans. Onilwyn was now flat to the floor, arms over his head for protection. Three faerie terriers were darting in and out to nip at him. The plumpest dog had sunk teeth into his boot top and was trying to shake it to death.
His sword lay on the floor by the large black stove. If you’re going to attack a brownie never do it on their home turf.
“She’s gone bogart,” Galen said over the crashing of metal.
I looked harder at her face. All brownies have skull-like faces because they have no nose, just nostrils. But if their faces look like evil grinning skulls, then they have gone evil—bogart. Brownies can thresh a field of wheat in a single day, or build a barn overnight. Think of that much power turned destructive, insanely destructive. They still tell stories in a lonely part of Scotland border country of a laird who raped and murdered a local girl. He didn’t realize her family had been adopted by a brownie. The laird and all his household were cut to pieces.
Maggie May was not quite a bogart, but she was working up to it.
“No,” Doyle said, “not bogart, not yet, but we must find a way to distract her before the knives join the battle.”
“Seems a shame,” Rhys said.
I agreed, but true bogarts are part of the sluagh, the evil host, not true Unseelie Court anymore. Maggie deserved better, no matter how I felt about Onilwyn.
Rhys shouted, “Maggie May, it’s Rhys! You sent for me, remember!”
The spoons swirled in to join the ladles, which left only the heavy iron forks, big enough to turn a side of beef, and the knives. We were running out of time.
I said the only thing I could think of that might shock her into listening. “Aunt Maggie, what happened to upset you?”
The pots began to slow like a swirl of heavy snowflakes brought to rest by a gentle wind. That wind laid them in neat lines on the heavy wooden table. “What d’ ye say?” she asked, and her voice was thick with suspicion.
“I said, Aunt Maggie, what happened to upset you?”
She frowned at me. “I’m not Aunt Maggie to you, girl.”
“You are my great-grandmother’s sister on my mother’s side. That makes you my great-aunt Maggie.”
She still looked unhappy, but nodded slowly, and said, “Aye, that be true. But you are a princess of the sidhe, whatever your blood be or be not. The sidhe donna acknowledge us.”
“Why not?” I asked.
She rubbed her hairy fingers across her nose-less face and frowned harder. “Princess Meredith, ye needs be more careful of who you be talkin’ in front of.” She looked at Onilwyn, who was getting painfully to his feet. There was blood on his pale skin.
“Yes, he is Cel’s creature. But Cel knows my bloodlines.”
“The sidhe know only what they wish to know about the blood that runs through their veins.” As she calmed her accent began to vanish. Her voice was cultured and midwest, nowhere like a news anchor. She’d cultivated that voice by talking on the phone to other faerie terrier fanciers across the country and the world. You couldn’t get a new breed of terrier recognized by the American Kennel Club if no one could understand what you were saying to them.
“Denying my heritage won’t change what I am,” I said. “It won’t make me one inch taller, or look one bit more royal sidhe.”
“Mayhaps,” Maggie said, smoothing her hands down her shapeless dress, “but it is not brownie blood that will put you on the throne.”
I reached over to the big cast-iron skillet where it lay on the table. I wrapped my hand around its cool metal handle. It was inert under my hand, just metal to me. I lifted the heavy skillet, changing my grip until I had the balance of it. “But it’s brownie blood that helps me do this.”
Her eyes narrowed at me. “Aye, or human.”
“Or human,” I agreed.
Onilwyn swayed and collapsed back to his knees. If he’d been human, he would probably have been dead.
“What set you and your dogs on him?” I asked.
Two of her terriers had come to her feet, but the plump one still growled at Onilwyn. I realized the dog wasn’t fat, she was pregnant. The bitch was so full of puppies that she waddled when she finally went back to Maggie’s call.
“Dulcie went to sniff his foot,” Maggie said. “She growled at him a bit. She would nae have bit him.” Her thin strong hands balled into fists. She seemed to be controlling herself with effort. “He kicked her, and her full of puppies. He kicked ma dog.”
My first memory was of being in a small dark cupboard with squirming puppies. One puppy was more than my lap could hold. A huge dog sat by the thin line of light of the curtains that covered the front of our hole. The silky fur of the faerie terrier puppies and that alert dog is still an utterly vivid memory. My father once told me what I, at around eighteen months, didn’t remember. My father and Barinthus had both been called away, so my father had left me with Maggie May. The queen’s steward had come unrepentantly to check on some dish for that night’s banquet. If the queen knew my father hid me in the kitchens, it would no longer be a haven for me.I’d crawled into the cupboard with the puppies and their mother, as I often did. I was very gentle with them even then, Maggie had told me once. When the steward came, she just closed the drapes hiding both me and the puppies. The steward didn’t believe it hid just puppies, so he tried to peek and the mother dog bit him. She protected her puppies and me.